Optical transponders are widely deployed to form long-haul, metro, inter- and intra-datacenter networks carrying vast amounts of data traffic. With the advent of coherent optical communication technology, the amount of data transmitted per optical wavelength has increased tremendously. With the current generation of so-called line cards, line side data rates of up to 200 Gbit/s per optical carrier can be achieved. Next generation line cards may offer up to 600 Gbit/s per optical carrier. Increased data rates can reduce the number of optical components such as lasers, modulators, and photodiodes, thereby lowering the cost and power consumption of the system. Increases in digital signal processor speed and complexity (i.e., smaller semiconductor fabrication nodes) has helped enable an increase in per-carrier capacity. The analog bandwidth of the system does not scale with smaller nodes, however, and meeting analog domain performance requirements can increase the cost, size, and power consumption of the optical transponder.